جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 50

Alexander’s pov The meeting had gone better than I'd dared hope. Three days of careful negotiation, of reading rooms full of men who specialised in obscuring their true intentions behind careful language, and I'd walked away with terms that exceeded even my most optimistic projections. Any other week, I'd have called my grandmother first, savoured the victory properly before moving on to the next thing. I hadn't thought about the deal in hours. I'd thought about Lily instead. I sat in the back of the car David had arranged for the airport transfer, a small bag of gifts on the seat beside me, a book I'd found in a Chicago shop specialising in rare first editions, the kind of thing I knew she'd light up over even though she'd never once asked me for anything expensive. A scarf in deep green, the exact shade I'd caught her admiring in a shop window weeks ago and pretending she hadn't. Small things. The kind of things a man bought when he'd started building an entire private catalo

Lily’s pov I didn't know what to do with myself anymore.The hospital room felt smaller with every passing hour, the walls pressing closer, my thoughts circling the same exhausted loop they'd been trapped in since the doctor delivered news I still hadn't found the strength to absorb properly. A baby. A marriage I no longer trusted. A missing daughter I still hadn't found any real path back to. Three separate griefs, all tangled together into something too heavy to carry alone, and yet here I was, entirely alone with all of it.I couldn't go back to the apartment. Alexander would find me there within the hour of returning, and I wasn't ready, not for his face, not for whatever careful explanation he'd have prepared, not for the particular danger of looking into his eyes and believing him anyway, truth or lie. I knew myself well enough by now to understand how easily his voice alone could undo every careful wall I'd built since that file.My phone sat useless on the small table beside

Lily’s pov I woke slowly, the unfamiliar ceiling taking a moment to resolve into memory, the small house, the quiet countryside, Katherine's promise to return by evening.The morning light filtering through the curtains carried a soft, pale quality, the kind that came before a house had properly woken up around you. I lay there a moment longer than necessary, one hand resting against my still-flat stomach, feeling the particular strange loneliness of waking alone in a place that wasn't yet familiar enough to feel safe.I thought, briefly, of Alexander, the particular warmth of waking beside him these past weeks, his arm already curled around me before either of us had fully surfaced from sleep. I pushed the thought away as quickly as it arrived. I didn't have the strength this morning to untangle my feelings about him. Grief and love and betrayal all sat too close together in my chest, indistinguishable from one another most days, and I'd learned it was easier simply not to examine a

Alexander’s pov My mind wouldn't stay still.I'd tried, genuinely tried, to follow Grandma Rose's instructions and rest at the house for a second full day, propped up in that borrowed study with a cast on my arm and a mind that refused to cooperate with anything resembling calm. Every hour I spent sitting idle only left more room for the same unanswerable questions to circle endlessly, where Lily had gone, who had constructed that fake hospital text with such precision, why the photograph Anna produced had felt wrong the moment I'd first looked at it despite offering no obvious tell as to how.I'd lasted until nearly noon before the walls started closing in properly, every unanswered question circling louder and louder until sitting still felt like its own particular form of torture."You shouldn't be going anywhere," Grandma Rose had said, arms crossed in the doorway, watching me struggle one-handed into my jacket with obvious disapproval."I need to check something at the office. I

Lily’s pov My wrists had gone raw hours ago, the rope biting deep enough that every small movement sent fresh fire through skin already rubbed thin.I'd stopped fighting the restraints sometime in the night, my strength finally giving out somewhere between exhaustion and the particular hopelessness of understanding, with total clarity, that no amount of struggling would loosen a knot tied by men who clearly knew exactly what they were doing. I'd cried until there was nothing left to cry with, my throat raw, my eyes swollen, the isolated house holding my grief with the same indifferent silence it had held everything else since Katherine first locked that door.I'd spent the long hours in between trying to keep my mind occupied with anything other than the fear, running through every memory of Alexander I had, cataloguing them carefully, as though holding onto them tightly enough might somehow bring him closer. The way he'd looked at me across that rooftop restaurant. The particular ge